Contents

Getting started

If you want to work on ListenBrainz you should show that you are able to set up the server software and understand how some of the infrastructure works. Here are some things that we might ask you about

Show that you understand the goals that ListenBrainz wants to achieve, which are written on its homepage

Install the server on your computer or use the Vagrant setup scripts to build a virtual machine

Create an oauth application on the MusicBrainz website and add the configuration information to your ListenBrainz server. Use this to log in to your server with your MusicBrainz details

Use the import script that is part of the ListenBrainz server to load scrobbles from last.fm to your ListenBrainz server, or the main ListenBrainz server

Use your preferred programming language to write a submission tool that can send Listen data to ListenBrainz. You could make up some fake data for song names and artists. This data doesn't have to be real.

Try and delete the ListenBrainz database on your local server to remove the fake data that you added.

Look at the list of tickets that we have open for ListenBrainz and see if you understand what tasks the tickets involve

If you want to, see if you can contribute to fixing a ticket. Either add a comment to the ticket or ask in IRC for clarification if you don't understand what the ticket means

Ideas

Create beautiful charts/graphs for user behaviour

ListenBrainz now has a statistics infrastructure that collects and computes statistics from the listen data that has been stored in Google's BigQuery tool. For this summer we are looking for a student who has some design skills and a general feel for the design process to help us build beautiful graphs from our collected user data. It is easy to create crappy looking graphs that are not compelling to the end user -- we can do that ourselves. If you are interested in working with us over the summer, you'll need to appear in IRC and discuss your ideas with potential mentors -- be prepared to demonstrate some prior work that illustrates your competence in design and javascript. And ideal candidate would already know the D3 toolkit we intend to use for our graphs.

A way to associate listens with MBIDs

Last.fm is broken because of the terrible way it handles metadata (artists with the same name are jumbled into a single page; at the same time, there are often multiple pages for the same artist/album/track due to spelling variations). ListenBrainz is smarter by taking advantage of MBIDs. But there needs to be some sort of interface for identifying listens as being for a particular track (or recording) MBID. This could allow the user to identify an album they listened to on Spotify as the same one they listen to in iTunes a few days later. Then they wouldn't remain separate artists or albums in the stats due to differences in metadata alone.